Disfluent phenomena such as pauses, hesitations and repairs, are investigated in a corpus of forty-two short samples of spontaneous speech of native French speakers and learners of French. Significant quantitative differences between native speakers and learners were found and interpreted in the light of Bialystok’s and McLaughlin’s theories of language processing and the two key concepts of automaticity and control. A greater requirement of processing time on the part of the language learners was attributed to their greater use of controlled processes. An analysis of lexical and syntactic selection and repair was carried out to determine where control was applied. While native speakers were attending to the construction of the referent, learners were more concerned with syntactic construction.